Atomic upgrades, booting, and package systems

Current major consumer operating systems like Microsoft Windows and the Playstation 3 explicitly warn the user "don't turn off your computer" for upgrades. But the state of the art in many Linux-based "distributions" is to simply ignore this; if you happen to lose power or the kernel crashes, your system is quite likely toast, and you need a recovery CD. This isn't acceptable.

This presentation will discuss my research into the area, working prototype code, and further work necessary in the core plumbing (particularly bootup and configuration management) to get fully atomic upgrades.

Topic Lead: Colin Walters
Colin has contributed to many different Free and Open Source software projects, including GNU Emacs, Debian, rpm, and dbus, but primarily works on GNOME for Red Hat, Inc.